Thoughts of a GP (family doctor) working for the National Health Service in the UK.

Saturday, 11 August 2007

Salutary lesson

This morning I had a major problem with corruption on the hard disk that stores most of my data. Almost all the files were lost.

But fortunately (for I am a fortunate man) I had a complete backup on an external disk drive which was last updated just under three weeks ago. Of course I am now kicking myself that I don't back up every week. However, although there will be some inconvenience it is nowhere near as much as it would have been with no backup at all.

The lesson is clear - take regular backups! My solution was to buy an external hard drive and backup onto that. You may prefer to do something different, but please make sure you have some sort of backup.

I salute all my readers who already back-up their files assiduously. This has been a public service announcement for the others. :-)

7 comments:

Now then, this reminds me far too much about work. I give people a regular talking to about this - but it never happens to them, and if it does it's my fault for not reminding them more often - honestly :)

PS. Memory sticks are the quick and easy answer, nowadays they are inexpensive and have huge capacity.

Presumably you have a LAN in the practise? Can you not be set up to enter data both to your hard disk and the server, with synchronisation between the two? I'm not an I.T. expert but this is the way we're set up at work...

I should think you are talking about home not work since you told us Friday was your last day at work for a while. Most GP practices will be doing daily backups. Which reminds me that many of us are very diligent with work and slipshod at home in all sorts of ways.

BT are advertising some sort of central backup system. I must say I am uneasy that a commercial organisation would hold the entire contents of my computer on their system - nearly as bad as the NHS holding all our information and making it available to all sorts of odds and sods - yes really!

I too have an external Hard drive, but I got the network version, which means that I can connect it via Ethernet to my wireless router and it has now become a fileserver for all computers in the home (as it is a 250Gb drive) - all for a paltry £78.99 too! Worth every penny.

About me

I am a middle-aged GP working for the NHS in an urban environment somewhere in this sceptred isle (this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England).
"Andrew Brown" is a pseudonym and I apologise to the six real Dr Andrew Browns on the GMC's Register of GPs, who are doubtless much better doctors than I.

Lecture note

All diseases are psychosomatic.

About the blog

The name of this blog is a homage to the classic book by John Berger and Jean Mohr. It is in part an attempt to determine whether the modern GP can still be considered fortunate. I like (almost) all my patients, and I hope that this is evident in these stories. I have disguised many details, and the blog is anonymous to further protect their identity. If you think you recognise somebody - you're wrong!